Via Pajamas Media, LGF has word that CENTCOM and Iraqis are planning to address the Capt. Jamil Hussein matter tomorrow:

Sir:
I have just learned from Mr. Costlow, mentioned below, that Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the official Ministry of……

Been a lot of domestic reporters fired in the past few years at major US media outlets for cutting stories from whole cloth…and those were ones that didn’t even have a political motivation to do so.

Now there is two motivations – political for the first bogus story, and desperation for the second defense of it.

Habeas freaking Corpus baby — produce the effing bodies. Show me the burned corpses or at least fresh graves, or show me the supposed sources. “Proof by repeated assertion” isn’t good enough anymore with these people.

Allahpundit thinks that it’s beyond credibility that the AP would make up three anonymous witnesses to confirm their account of what happened at the mosque in Hurriya. And ordinarily I would agree with him, if in fact the AP hadn’t……

Occam’s Razor says it’s number one; to believe it’s number three, you have to believe the AP is capable of journalistic fraud on a scale that’s an order of magnitude beyond what we’ve seen from the media, as bad as they’ve been.

Not really… a short list for your Google pleasure: Janet Cooke, CBS Reports: The Wall Within, Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley…

Centcom: Iraqis will announce tomorrow that AP source is fake

…pre-news?

I’m not sure what would cause us to believe they are not capable of planning this “skit” and having their stories organized beforehand.

Isn’t this the same blog that has written in-depth about previous staged attacks?

You can’t simply assume the three choices are valid, since they are dependent on the witnesses being real.

If the witnesses don’t exist then all three choices are out the window.

So far, all I’ve read is that every person involved either doesn’t exist, or is un-named.

(4) they heard/read the accounts in the media and parroted them to anyone to asked four days later.

That was my guess -but not necessarily the media. Depending on the community, it could just be passing from person to person.

On another note, I’m guessing the AP interviewed many, many people to be sure they had it right (isn’t that their job?). But only two gave “nearly identical accounts”. Depending on how you define “nearly identical” that could be completely meaningless.

(Part 4 — Continued from this post.) — Updated and bumped…

It happens all the time. It also explains why the are so consistent when eye-winess accounts usually diverge significantly.

Ok OK I’m done.

I could basically give a full account of what happend based on what I read. So the question is are these witnesses of the event or witnesses of what was reported in the papers ?